America & Catholicism

America was founded by Catholics but settled by Protestants, specifically those Protestants (the Puritans) rebelling from the English Church which had rebelled from Rome several generations before; and the intellectual/spiritual struggle between the Catholics and Protestants for the animating spirit of America continues.

Where the evangelical comes from the conception of America as the “city on a hill’, the Catholic comes from the conception of the primacy of individual dignity, and this Personalism verus Exceptionalism as faith animating factors still drives the struggle.

One recent well-known evangelical to become Catholic (Francis Beckwith, president of the Evangelical Theological Society) provides some insight in an interview in "Christianity Today".

For some time we have been in a Catholic informed period in public leadership as more people are attracted to the real as opposed to the reflection of the real, noted by Wick Allison, another well-known convert in William Buckley’s book, "Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith" :

“Wick Allison:

“Five things attracted me in stages to the Catholic Church:

"1. Its understanding of human nature and of human society. I was a student in the sixties when theories about the perfectability of man and schemes for new utopias were the intellectual air one breathed. I thought they were all rubbish. But I didn’t have a clear sense of why I thought that, and as I looked for intellectual support I stumbled across the Church Fathers, or writings about the Church Fathers; their clarity, their appeal to the evidence of the senses and, most of all, to common sense, their insistence on the unchanging nature of creation, all these were to me like drinking from a freshwater spring. I became interested in the religion that seemed to foster such clear thinking.

"2. Its antiquity. I became impressed that such views were held and argued with a consistent vigor over the centuries by all sorts of different people who were Catholic. I became interested in such subjects as the apostolic succession and the Church’s claim that it is the original Church founded by Jesus. Just as any thinking person in the West sooner or later has to confront the claims of Jesus, sooner or later he has to confront this claim of the Catholic Church.

"3. Its universality. I found it interesting, when I read them, that St. Augustine and Cardinal Newman both came to the same conclusion that the Catholic faith was the true Christianity by this fact of its ubiquity. I was raised in a denomination (Methodist) where one felt uncomfortable attending a church service in another part of town, much less another part of the country (in another part of the world was inconceivable). When I started getting interested in the Catholic faith I began to attend Mass. I was only an observer, and I really didn’t understand the significance of what I was observing, but I liked to go, and it was with a start one Sunday that I realized I was going to Mass in a city I was visiting, that I had been to Masses in lots of different places and that nothing much seemed different about any of them. This probably never occurs to a born Catholic but it comes as a shock to the rest of us.

"Part of the universalism is the diversity. In Protestantism a particular church, like a particular magazine or particular retail store, is geared to a demographic segment. It’s where like-minded people gather together to worship, so there’s no surprise that everyone looks, acts, and thinks the same. The first time I attended a Mass a Mexican gardener in his work clothes knelt down beside me.

"At first I was put off; I was raised among people who associated bad smell with unwashed Mexican gardeners. Here was one sitting next to me in church. Then I was dazzled. Of course it had to be this way! In the original Christian church the strictures of St. Paul are still followed: “Here you are neither Greek nor Jew…” Of all the things about the Catholic Church I love, this is the one thing I love the best.

"4. Mary. How does one talk to God? How does one relate to Christ the Savior? For me it was difficult. And so I turned to Mary. To this day I am not at all sure about the theological underpinnings of Mariology, and I suspect I’ll never investigate them. I took the concept of Mary as my Mother to heart from the beginning and, as Dante chose Virgil, made her my own personal guide to the Catholic faith. She has been wonderful!

"5. The Eucharist. This took a little longer. When my brother lived outside London he took me to see the oldest standing church in England, a squat Saxon building made out of stone. We went inside. The building was still set up as a church, with old wooden pews and altar fixtures. But what struck me immediately was how empty the place felt. And then I realized what was missing: the Eucharist. A church is warm; this place was cold. A church is somehow made alive by the Life inside it; this place was dead. It was sad. The chain of worship that should have united me with the sturdy, sixth-century yeomen who built the church had been broken.

"It was that experience that made me understand how important the Real presence had become for me and what my forefathers had given up when they discarded it." (p. 247-249)